The following description relates to enterprise systems and associated architectures and techniques for collaborative business processes. Companies face an increasing need for integration of and collaboration among their information and enterprise software systems. In most current system landscapes, many components are directly connected in a one-to-one relationship with other components, with the integration capabilities hardwired into the application components and individual mappings programs. Under these conditions, managing the collaborative sharing of information is difficult. These infrastructures can rarely represent actual business processes accurately, and are limited in their flexibility to dynamic business scenarios that govern business processes.
New electronic business collaboration, however, typically requires connectivity among all applications inside and outside of company boundaries. Networks such as the Internet provide opportunities for systems to communicate almost instantly with other systems or individuals. Business processes that once were restricted to intranets and their users are now moving to the Internet to become an effective composition of Web services. A Web service is a programmable, self-contained, self-describing, modular application function that can be published, discovered or invoked through an open Internet standard. However, comprehensive system upgrades of existing enterprise software, or large-scale replacement strategies in heterogeneous system landscapes tend to be too costly or otherwise and simply unfeasible in terms of time and capital resource costs.
While technical connectivity is provided using open protocols and standards like the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and extensible markup language (XML), the challenge of mapping different business semantics remains. To capture future rounds of efficiency gains, enterprises increasingly will be required to deploy a new breed of collaborative business processes that cross enterprises or functions within an enterprise. In addition, enterprises will increasingly need to process and manage real-time scenarios instead of performing batch processing.